For Trump, a Different Kind of ‘Locker Room Talk’

Green Bay Packers players linked arms during the singing of the national anthem before their game against the Chicago Bears on Thursday.CreditStacy Revere/Getty Images

I grew up in a nearly all-white suburb outside of Philadelphia, and no more than 10 percent of my classmates in school were African-American. They lived in a separate, all-black neighborhood of row homes called Bloomsdale. At our high school basketball games, the black students sat together in one corner of the gym. When the national anthem was played, most stayed seated on the wooden bleachers.

This was in the early 1970s. I can’t remember anyone ever challenging them, but their statement was noticed. They signaled that they did not fully feel part of the community or the nation and were in no mood to stand up, salute and pretend otherwise.

There’s a logic in using sports to make political statements. Little else in American life, nationally or locally, attracts the same attention or crowds. But to do so in recent decades has been rare, in large part because we have come to regard sport as some kind of sacred, thought-free space.

This sentiment was perfectly expressed in 1968 by the United States Olympic Committee when it reprimanded the sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith, sending them home after they raised their black-gloved fists on the medal stand at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City that year. “The untypical exhibitionism of these athletes,” the committee wrote, “violates the basic standards of good manners and sportsmanship, which are so highly valued in the United States.”

In other words: Run the race and shut up.

In the years since, most athletes have fallen in line. Some may have feared retribution from their leagues and teams, as well as jeopardizing their lucrative endorsement deals.

In 1990, the basketball star Michael Jordan declined to publicly oppose the re-election of Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina (Jordan’s home state), whom the political writer David Broder once described as “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.” It’s not clear whether Jordan, the consummate Nike pitchman, ever uttered a quote that’s been widely attributed to him — “Republicans buy sneakers, too” — but it does seem to accurately reflect his state of mind at the time.

So what happened last weekend in the National Football League?

Well, the trickle of N.F.L. players who had been kneeling during the playing of the national anthem turned into a deluge.

The uprise in protest is, first off, a function of athletes being driven nearly crazy by President Trump, which makes them no different than about half of America. The N.F.L. is a majority-black league. Its players have been angered by the spate of police shootings of unarmed black men; enraged by President Trump’s remarks following the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va.; and insulted after he called the players kneeling for the anthem “sons of bitches.”

But there is more to it than that, and it extends farther than the N.F.L., to the National Basketball Association and beyond. The politicization of sport may have as much to do with our previous president as it does with Donald Trump. A lot of professional athletes were drawn to President Obama, a black man, basketball junkie and ESPN habitué with a degree of cool they recognized — and they were moved for the first time to direct political engagement. They raised money and campaigned with him.

Politics and social action can have an addictive quality. The basketball superstar LeBron James, for one, perhaps the nation’s most popular athlete and one of its most thoughtful, seems hooked. In 2016, he spent time on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton.

Social media has also played a role. Many black athletes in the past were not willing to have their social or political views mediated through a world of sportswriters who were almost entirely white. That’s no longer a concern. Few groups in America have been better served by social media than professional athletes. They never much trusted writers to carry their message out to the public, and now they don’t have to. LeBron James communicates directly with 38.6 million people who follow him on Twitter. Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors, another prominent Trump critic, speaks to 10.5 million followers.

The current generation of coaches is also a factor. They are less authoritarian and more attuned to their players’ hearts and lives. Some of the most prominent among them are also the most worldly and, almost certainly, the most liberal in their politics, and they understand that encounters with police are the great leveler for the multimillionaire black athletes they coach.

“Our players clearly understand what it is to be marginalized,” Pete Carroll, the coach of the N.F.L.’s Seattle Seahawks, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday. “And they know that when they’re not football players and they’re off the field in their everyday lives, and they know that when they’re with their children and they have to prepare their children to act properly and be safe because of the things that they’re up against.”

Gregg Popovich, the coach of the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs, lit into President Trump at a news conference on the first day of training camp this week and then spoke more generally about race relations. “Why do we have to talk about it?” he said. “Well, because it’s uncomfortable and there has to be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change. Whether it’s the L.G.B.T. movement or women’s suffrage, it doesn’t matter. People have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people, because we’re comfortable.”

Since when does a guy coaching a pro basketball team call out white privilege and talk about L.G.B.T. rights and women’s suffrage? Now. He talks about it now. For anyone who has followed sports — or has written about it, as I have, over the course of several decades — it is shocking, if not disorienting.

Over the years, I have not met many top athletes I didn’t think were pretty smart. They master what they choose to engage with. That’s how they got where they are. The superstars are, by and large, supersmart. I’m not at all surprised the athletes taking on President Trump can do so credibly.

A friend of mine, a former Marine who served in Iraq, said to me the other day, only half-jokingly: “Now I’m really mad at Trump. He’s ruined football, too. I was looking forward to the season to tune all this stuff out, but now it’s impossible.”

I’m sure many sports fans agree. We all watch sports, to an extent, as a respite and a distraction, but just as President Trump has turned so much of the rest of society upside down, he has radically altered the world of sports.

It’s been almost exactly a year since Trump explained away his vulgar words on the “Hollywood Access” tape as “locker room talk.” We are now hearing a different kind of locker room talk. The door has been opened, athletes feel empowered and emboldened, and they are not going to stop.